Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Weaselly Reuters

Here are the results of the poll among the general public since it began a month ago (restricted to just registered voters, Trump does slightly better, with 49.5% agreeing). It asks respondents if they think Trump will put the country's interests ahead of his own:

Some glass-half-empty headline that is! Yes, technically fewer than half of respondents agreed with the statement, but considerably more agreed with it than disagreed with it. The results are presented as though the question is a binary one when in fact it is trinary, with a "not sure" option included. To see the results broken out requires drilling down further into the particular poll. If a reader is just scrolling through the headlines, he'd have no idea.

If respondents had to either agree or disagree, a majority would almost certainly say they expect Trump to put the country's interests ahead of his own. That he is doing ten points better on this issue than he did in the election itself should objectively be perceived as a positive thing for him. Such an assessment doesn't fit The Narrative, of course, so that's not what we get.

To the contrary, push-polling this result was the primary purpose of fake news outlets BuzzFeed and CNN taking out fourth mortgages on their credibility by publishing the risibletroll job pretending that Putin trapped Trump using Russian prostitutes giving golden showers.

It's only slightly hyperbolic to say that if the allegations are controversial, a heavy dose of skepticism is warranted until at least one of the following conditions is met; 1) Verifiable primary source material is produced, 2) There are non-coercive admissions by the parties involved, or 3) WikiLeaks reports it.

While there's plenty of schadenfreude to be had as the legacy media crumbles, Trump is now the single most powerful person on the planet. We have a vested interest in holding him to account, but the legacy and SJW media machines have forfeited every ounce of good faith they used to enjoy among non-partisans. The boy-who-cried-wolf dynamic in play is potentially dangerous.

Speaking of "fake news", now that the media is urging the retirement of the phrase that has been appropriated as devastatingly as Pepe was, it's imperative we keep using it emphatically and repetitiously. Anytime you'd have previously written or said "the mainstream media" or "the major media", consider writing or saying "fake news" instead.

Jack is right. This is standard practice. For every one time we point it out, it goes unnoticed 100 times. The upshot is a wide spread distrust of institutions throughout the western world. It is getting worse. It is going to keep getting worse.

The battle lines are clearly drawn now. An objective media that is by default skeptical of the government is ideal. That is an impossibility in the seeming late stages of the West. The purveyors of fake news have made their beds, now they get to lie (heh) in them.